For me, the Vietnam War was condensed into two memories. In 1970, when I was 11, my across-the-street-neighbor Gary Dickerson, a 21-year-old Navy Corpsman assigned to the Marines, came home from Vietnam with two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, one arm and a badly mangled leg that could barely support his weight in the remaining 40 years of his life. He died at 58, the age I am now.
That same year, the phone in our home began ringing early one morning with neighbors and friends wanting to know if the photo published on the front page of the local newspaper of a student anti-war protester wagging his finger in the face of an MP was my brother, Freddy. It was. My parents were mortified.
That’s it. My memories of Vietnam are limited, but personal.
During the intervening years, I’ve read a fair amount about the war and watched movies and documentaries, which combined, fashioned my own, admittedly imperfect, understanding of the war.
Over the past week-and-a-half, my understanding of the war has been dramatically enhanced, thanks to the PBS documentary series, “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
The epic series, 10 years in the making, is presented in 10 episodes over 18 hours. The final two episodes air tonight and Thursday.
After each episode, I’ve needed an hour or so to process what I had seen, to sort out the emotions it evoked — 14 hours, so far, of heart-breaking, disturbing, frustrating, infuriating, awe-inspiring brilliance.
As documentaries are designed to do, The Vietnam War seeks to convey the history of the war, its roots, policies, key developments, miscalculations, outcomes and consequences.
But anyone familiar with Burns’ work — most notably “The Civil War” — knows that it is his ability to tell the human dramas that aren’t found in the historical narrative that makes his work so poignant and powerful.
The range of those stories, which humanize the war from every conceivable perspective — soldiers and civilians from both sides, combat nurses, POWs, protesters, families of those who died — unleash a torrent of emotions, many of them in conflict with one another.
At one moment you are stunned by the profound courage of the young men who fought. At the next moment, you are horrified at the brutality of it all. As one U.S. soldier noted in the documentary, the veneer of civilization is thin in times of war.
It is a story of incompetence and hubris, but also of bravery and sacrifice.
The Vietnam War was many things, of course, and what it meant relies on your perspective. This particularly true for those of us who came of age during that time.
I don’t think there is anyone out there who doesn’t recognize the war as a tragedy when we measure what was gained — nothing but a lesson we seem determined not to have learned. This despite more than 58,000 U.S. dead out of a staggering 3.4 million war deaths overall.
Tonight and Thursday, I’ll tune in to see the documentary to its conclusion with a mix of dread and anticipation. I will do so with a deep appreciation of those who fought and with the bitter realization of just how little these Americans meant to the powerful few who executed the war.
Some stories don’t have happy endings.
This one certainly will not.
Maybe that’s part of the reason I feel obliged to watch.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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